Before I Deconverted: My Christian Childhood

12 years ago today, on October 30, 1999 as a 21 year old college junior majoring in philosophy and minoring in religion at religiously and politically super-conservative Grove City College, I stopped being a Christian. Below the fold, for those interested in these sorts of narratives, is the first installment of a series of posts in which I will share the key turning points in the creation, evolution, devolution, abandonment, and recovery from my faith.

Converting

1983-1992: When I was 5, my disaffected Catholic parents unwittingly sent my 13 year old brother to a church camp that was in the business of converting unsuspecting children to evangelical Christianity, with zero concern for what those kids’ parents might think of that. My brother came home and told our parents, “I have been baptized. I am going to go start attending the Port Jefferson Church of Christ and if you won’t take me the minister will come and pick me up.”

My mother decided she had to figure out what she had accidentally gotten her son into. My mom is a wonderfully social person. She fell head over heels for the welcoming community she found and came to become a fervent evangelical Christian by the following February. 9 years later the church would start to dissolve in dissension and she has forever since never been very comfortable in, or attached to, any of her new church homes. I get the impression she only goes to my now-minister brother’s church out of religious faithfulness and to watch my brother preach. She always talks wistfully of the golden days of Port Jefferson Church of Christ.

My first memory of church—which, as a memory from when I was 5 is apocryphal—is being in Sunday School for the first time and being driven mad that all the questions the teacher was asking were answered by a word I didn’t know. “Jesus”. Being a smart kid, this drove me nuts. I would figure out what this “Jesus” was if it was the end of me. (And it almost was!)

And boy did I learn about Jesus. I remember at 18 returning to my elementary school to revisit my beloved first and second grade teachers. I could just see the disappointment on their faces that a kid who loved science so much when little had become an anti-scientific Jesus freak. For some reason the pull to learn about Jesus overwhelmed the pull to understand the natural world.

The Joys of Brainwashing

1989-1999: I remember going to church camp for the first time when I was 11 years old. I spent at least a week and usually more (and eventually whole summers) at church camp until I deconverted. Let me tell you, the thing they don’t tell you about being at a brainwashing camp, either as the brainwashed or the brainwashing, is that it is incredibly fun. Being surrounded by your peers, especially as a kid—sleeping in a cabin with a whole bunch of other kids your own age and only falling asleep when everyone has exhausted themselves form joking around in the dark after all day playing games, singing songs, eating all your meals together, having campfires, being whipped up into an emotional frenzy by shameless adults who have no qualms about saying or doing anything necessary to manipulate you into believing that fairy tales are real and you will hurt God’s feelings after he suffered on the cross for you and go to hell if you don’t believe them.

And let’s not forget getting massive crushes on the girls who you are interacting with way more often and way more emotionally than you ever do in school. And, maybe, you know sneaking out at night with those girls to play spin the bottle or maybe make out at the infamous gigantic rock where who knows how many people have gotten to who knows how many bases for the first time? (Billy Joel apparently told Playboy that he had his first sexual experience at the camp I grew up at.)

And as a kid the counselors, college kids and adults who took concentrated interest in us kids, were the coolest people you could imagine. It was so painful saying goodbye to all the new friends and all the counselors. Of course, not everyone’s experience of the counselors were so good. At least one friend of mine was molested.

The one thing I ever miss about being a Christian was the ignorant, isolated bliss of camp. To this day, I have dreams (nightmares?) where they let me go back to Christian camp even though I am an avowed atheist. Maybe it’s that they let me go in non-teaching capacity. Or they let me go but I have to carefully walk the line of saying only true things but still not disturbing anyone’s faith. These dreams torture me, they bring out the longing for the sheer naive emotional intensities of being 11-21 years old secluded from the world, alone in nature with dozens of people all falling in love with each other, over the course of a week living as a commune thinking the same.

It is a strange nostalgia for someone like me, a rationalist, a contrarian, and someone who intensely hates emotional manipulation and brainwashing on principle. It is a longing for the emotions and for their good causes, but not their despicable ones.

Baptism

August 20, 1989: After an intense week of Christian camp I came home ready to be baptized. It was a huge deal in my church that kids choose this when they really, really believed and were sure they believed. It was a big deal that only true believers, and therefore, those old enough to truly believe, got baptized. Free, cognitive assent was a basic value then. Is that part of why I still value that so much today?

The Two Paths

1987-1991: I was baptized by my minister brother. This was a big deal to me. I wanted to be him. My other brother was destroying his life. He was an alcoholic since he was a teenager. I grew up idolizing my brothers’ friends. I grew up preferring the eventual-alcoholic brother over the eventual-minister brother until I was about 9 when one of my eventual-alcoholic brothers’ friends—the pizza guy who worked in his parents’ pizzeria—called up my house and deadly seriously asked to talk to my parents. My brother was there to beat him up over a girl, my brother’s first love who had cheated on him. The same brother was in a car wreck that had his hand in a cast for his high school graduation. The same brother (deceived about her age) got a 16 year old pregnant at 21 years old and wound up in jail for assaulting her a few years later.

When I first published this post I discussed one aspect of my experience of Christmas as a young Christian. I’ve since devoted a full post to that topic and moved those paragraphs to that post instead.

Young Evangelizing In The Secular Camp

1989-1991: Christian camp was only a week or several long (but there are countless stories I should some day chronicle here if I ever get around to it). For several summers I spent longer at a secular camp at which I was bullied reasonably hard (not over religion, just over, you know, being alive—because that’s what kids do to other kids just for being there). The only derisive nickname I ever had was one I had there, “Finckletoes”.

I did have some friends though, possibly all of them Jewish. Growing up on Long Island, even as my best friends changed every few years, always one of my closest friends would be a Jewish kid. So, coming back from evangelical Christian camp on fire to share the Gospel, I was eager to try to convert my Jewish friends. The secular camp I went to took trips out of state. Staying in hotels with our friends, no kids wanted to sleep. We’d stay up all night talking and horsing around. The counselors would mercilessly not let us sleep on the bus the next morning so that we’d be tired enough to start sleeping nights in the hotel after that.

I remember in those late nights, trembling with nervousness and devout seriousness, being 12, 13 years old trying to share the Gospel with my Jewish friends. I remember at 12 preaching the virtues of abstinence to another friend. My intense concern about other people’s views on religion began young. Happily, I was never obnoxious enough to lose any of my Jewish friends. They tolerated me and accepted me always with unflappable aplomb and were teflon to my arguments, unshakable in their identity with no need to change mine. Today if I had to be a part of any religious tradition, in its contemporary form, it would be easily be theirs.

One last related memory. I remember at the secular camp, we were going to have a special night where our boys troop and the correspondingly aged girls troop would stay late and play games and perform skits for each other. My group picked and elaborately rehearsed the Beastie Boys’ “You’ve Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party” and I was terrified.

I had learned in church, from a documentary called “Hell’s Bells” about how rock music was satanic. And these lyrics were clearly evil. I was sick to my stomach and alienated and scared to death. I snuck home without telling anyone. This freaked out the people in charge of me who lost track of me. I remember my 17 year old brother having to come up to my room and do a lot of damage control with me.

I leave you with the everything-is-terrible worthy documentary which scarred my impressionable young mind:

Before seeing that video, I was a normal kid whose favorite song in the world was the truly epic (hilariously dirty) pop-rock-hair-metal-hedonism song “Pour Some Sugar On Me”. I love it again today and feel like I should include it here to cleanse the palette after all that fundamentalism above!

Your Thoughts?

Read posts in my ongoing “deconversion series” in order to learn more about my experience as a Christian, how I deconverted, what it was like for me when I deconverted, and where my life and my thoughts went after I deconverted.